supermarket sweep television show episodes

#Supermarket sweep television show episodes series#

I trust the difference in both presentation and annoyance factor here is fairly clear. Awkwardly high-fives partner.Ģ020 contestant: “Aw yeeeeh, it’s ya boys TEAM APPLE DUMPLINGS IN THE HOUSE!” *Chest bumps, then barks like a dog seven times*. That’s an actual thing that happens in every episode of Supermarket Sweep before the trivia questions begin.īy way of illustration, here’s how contestants of each era might be expected to react to winning an additional 10 seconds for their sweep time.ġ990s contestant: *Nervous titter*, sideways glance. Almost every person on this show seems to be using it like a demo reel for their own PewDiePie-style lifestyle network, mugging to the camera at every opportunity to the point that a staple of every episode is host Leslie Jones reminding contestants to shut up when the camera isn’t on them. These are the children of the YouTube influencer and Twitch streamer eras, raised on a diet of catchphrases, impatient editing and that most integral of presentation styles: CONSTANT YELLING. Not once do you imagine that one of them is attempting to use this experience to pad their resume or build their follower count.įast-forward to 2021, and the contestants begin sadly reflecting who we have become as an Always Online society: Loud, belligerent, greedy and relentlessly attention seeking. They seem like average people, plucked from the streets. They’re just excited by the ridiculous prospect of running around a fake supermarket, hurling rotten hams into their cart in a joyous celebration of American excess, en route to winning $5,000. From the mousy college students, to the mother-daughter alliances, to the countless housewives and homemakers, there’s never a sense that any of them have sought time in front of a camera in their lives.

Here’s the thing about the contestants in those ‘90s throwback episodes: They’re almost painfully earnest, and that’s their saving grace. Worse still, I think the show’s producers are imagining an audience who identifies with these contestants, and if that’s true, it speaks to a deeply obnoxious U.S. Perhaps we’re meant to guffaw at the outsized egos and rampant spotlight-grubbing of these contestants in particular, so desperate are they for a brief moment with thousands of eyes fixed on them. Who knows: Perhaps it actually was designed with that very thought in mind. It’s as if it was designed with annoyance as the goal.

#Supermarket sweep television show episodes series#

If the ‘90s series is endearingly absurd to watch today, this new version is working much harder to be profoundly obnoxious. Rather, what I found disturbing was the way this Supermarket Sweep reboot highlights the worst evolutionary leaps of our own culture in the last 30 years-it’s like a microcosm of our slide into Idiocracy-style stagnation. Spooling through the episodes now available to stream on Hulu, I began to note that the trouble with this new version isn’t necessarily the game-ification of consumerism that has always been the central aspect of the show’s DNA.

That series debuted in the fall, and just finished its first season.Īnd as it turns out … no, Supermarket Sweep doesn’t really work today, although not necessarily for the reasons I expected. I ended up watching all of those episodes, enjoying them for what I ended up dubbing their “earnest stupidity.” I wondered aloud, then, whether such a guileless, blatantly advertorial concept could possibly work on modern television, given the approaching ABC reboot of the series hosted by SNL alum Leslie Jones.

Here was a series I hadn’t seen an episode of in at least 20 years, preserved like a cryogenically frozen slice of early 1990s popular culture. Back in the summer, Netflix began hosting a small collection of vintage episodes of seminal ‘90s game show Supermarket Sweep, and I found myself caught up in a wave of nostalgia.